FILM SYNOPSIS: Peter Quill and his band of misfits — Gamora, Drax, Rocket and Baby Groot — are still combing the galaxy for a payday when they become entangled in a conflict between the Sovereign and their foes. Matters grow even more complicated when Quill’s long-lost father tempts his son to join him and abandon his friends.

Personally, I believe that the Best Visual Effects Oscar should ultimately go to the film which integrates its visual effects the most effectively with the rest of the film. A film that uses the effects to enhance the story its telling in a natural and almost unnoticeable way are what I deem the best. The next step to that would be whether or not the team does the visual effects well. In this day and age, where almost every film has at least some visual effects taking place in them (see “I, Tonya” for example), a film that cannot rise to the level of not taking you out of the film simply is not rising to the level that other films are. So a film like “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2,” for example, is for the most part on par with the quality of visual effects, but it almost relies too heavily on the effects, whereas films like “War for the Planet of the Apes” and “Blade Runner 2049” first and foremost focus on story and acting and use the visual effects as a means to an end. Not that “Guardians” can help a lot of that, seeing as its a film based in space on a completely CGI planet called Ego, but there has to have been ways to cut back on the visual effects.

All the Marvel films delve into the realm of too many visual effects. And with that comes the hard fact that not all of the effects will look as polished as the others. For me, the visual effects that bumped were the de-aging effects on Kurt Russell and the transformation that Russell’s character underwent every time his body had to reform, showing the building of a human body through visual effects. These elements felt thin and took me out of the film as a whole. However, “Guardians” does an amazing job of creating characters out of scratch. Rocket and Groot are both exquisite characters and without the attention to detail on them, I feel like they might fall through. Look at the villain Steppenwolf from DC’s “Justice League.” Here was a completely CGI character that felt absolutely hollow. But Rocket and Groot feel just as real as their human counterpoints. The space battles are nicely done, most the planet Ego works, and the underground end battle is one of the best that Marvel has done. But what it all comes down to is that “Guardians” really does not do much to push it past anything else nominated this year. If you ask me, “War for the Planet of the Apes” does more with its motion capture visual effects than “Guardians” does with its entire onslaught of effects. Even “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is more visually memorable than “Guardians,” producing some of the best scenes of any movie of 2017. I would be extremely surprised to see “Guardians” pull off the win. Give it to “War for the Planet of the Apes” or “Blade Runner 2049.”